it has nothing to do with right, wrong, abstinence education or any of that it is because the average girl can easily have a great variety of sexual experiences with a great variety of men but the average male can't do the same with comparable women, so males always feel at a disadvantage. Think about it, hot guys will sleep with lots of average girls, on a one night basis, but how many hot girls will do the same with average guys. There is also the fact that women subtlely, and sometimes not so subtley, use the fact of their greater experience/success to imply that they are more attractive, socially skilled, etc. and or that because they are the "experts" on sex and relationships they should be granted some extra authority.

It just strikes me as wrong to imagine that the therapist made rich by the dutiful attendance at therapy of uptight boyfriends will purchase a BOAT. Therapists don't purchase boats. They buy Passat wagons, weeks at Rancho La Puerta, and trips to Siena. Not boats. They shrink your head for the PASSAT WAGON!

1. Let's face it: most people of both genders over the age of 22 are not virgins. They have been with other people. In the modern era, people are just going to have to suck it up and deal with the fact that their SO's body parts aren't 100% pure and reserved only for them forever.

2. I bet more men would be weirded out by a chick over 22 who was a virgin than one who'd boinked her way around. Hell, I waited until I was 20 and that still kinda freaked out the guy I ended up losing it to.

3. And speaking of, I've hardly boinked anyone (let's just say, they'd all fit on one hand), and yet I've had a threesome. Does that make me a dirty, dirty whore? Yes, to some people, it does. But if they were going to be utterly traumatized by it, then screw them. It's none of their damned business what I did years before they came along, and if they can't deal with it, leave. Hell, one of my exes did something really disgusting (let's just say the words "BJ," "homeless" and "alley" were involved), and I still stayed with him instead of acting like the LW's boyfriend. Why? Because that was years ago and he wasn't still that teenage idiot, and anything that went on before me wasn't my business unless an STD was involved.

Oh, and while we're citing fiction, how's about the (admittedly trashy, but fun) book Scruples 2? One character (Sasha) unabashedly dated 3 men at a time in Scruples until she fell in love with a much older man and married him. Her husband ends up meeting one of her exes and acts just the way the LW's boyfriend did about it, to the point where she had to give up and divorce him. When she got together with her second husband, she immediately confessed to her OMG SO HORRIBLE SLUT past, and his response was something like, "I hope they all enjoyed it." He didn't give a damn and married her anyway.

THAT is the kind of fellow the LW should be with- someone who's not going to judge her on things that happened long before he came into her life. She can't go back in time and un-fuck people, for chrissake, and if his timid little brain is sooooooo hurt by her having a life before him, then he should go date someone at a fundie church. Sheesh.

Aside from the issues of disrespect and judgment that are at play here, I think you have also exposed an important element of this man's participation in your relationship: a lack of willingness to work to find a resolution to a serious issue in your relationship. Clearly you want very much to find a way to repair the relationship - to learn to communicate about it and to resolve what has happened such that you can value and love one another as you did early in the relationship. It would seem that he is resistant to participating in finding a resolution. This is an important thing for you to know. If he is not willing to work with you to resolve this difference, what other differences will he be unwilling to address in the future? Having been married for 10 years myself, I never could have anticipated the things that my husband and I would find ourselves disagreeing about as we travel through life together. Every so often we find one that is particularly difficult to work through and occasionally seek outside professional help to do it. If we weren't both committed to working on things together we would be very distant from each other by now. A lot of little distances and disagrements eventually add up to a big chasm between you.

If he doesn't value the relationship enough now to work to resolve your differences/disagreements, I doubt he will value it enough in the future to do so.

Alex, congratulations for reading Foucault and Simone de Beauvoir. But for a grad student, you haven't learned to make a very coherent argument. 1) Sex is irrational and LW should understand her BF's insecurity or 2) BF is rational, reasonable, and morally justified in rejecting his girlfriend because of her past. Which is it? Or will you tell me it's both? Come on dear grad student, do what you all do best, reconcile the tension with your elegant prose clarity of thought.

I don't know if I'm a third-wave feminist or whatever. But this BF sounds like a snively wimp. Not because he doesn't like the idea of his girlfriend in a threesome. Because he's lorded it over LW for 6 months. Sure he's entitled to his emotions. But he needs to sort them out: does it mean the relationship is over? Does it mean he needs to make peace with it? Or does it mean he now has the right to be passive aggressive and make her feel like crap until he's unloaded all his anger? Apparently, if LW's account is accurate, he picked option three. Snively wimp. Alex by obsessing over the threesome thing you're missing the point of the letter. But that's probably intentional; what you really want to talk about is sex and double-standards. You want to bait people and use spiffy phrases like "misdirected feminist anger." Ok, fine, if that's your thing.

And for the record, you don't sound like a dinosaur. You sound like someone who spends a lot of time and energy noticing that the people around him are unworthy.